EMBRACE THE ANTIFUTURE! || BEWARE THE VORTEX! || ABANDON THE EGO! || CARRY A DREAMCAST VMU! || DELETE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA! || MOVE WITH THE FLUID! || RETURN TO WATER! || DISCIPLINE THE SOUL! || QUESTION THE IMMATERIAL! || 1999 FOREVER! ||

info art literature links index

BEHIND THE WHEEL OF YOUR SPACE MOBILE (04/30/2022) back He was jolted awake from his trance by a thunderous blast of impatient car-horn. With his heart having leapt into his throat to solidify into an uncomfortable rock, his foot hammered down on the accelerator and the vehicle lurched forward, knocking his back against the seat. The frustrated headlights behind him swerved to one side, drifted forward, and left him in the dark with the warm scent of gasoline. The stomach-punch heart pounding made him slightly nauseous, and he glanced into the rear-view mirror to grab his conscience and shake it awake by the shoulders. Two stressed, heavily-browed dark brown eyes peered back into his own eyes, with the nervousness of a cornered animal, an anxious pair of dice rolled by accident. His eyes left the mirror and looked back out into the headlight-illuminated road in front of him, with streaky rain tapping and rolling down his windshield, mixed with those thin pins and needles of water reflecting light before vanishing. The 'NOT IN SERVICE' atop the car, though dimly-lit yellowed plastic, must have been enchanted or hexed, containing an essence powerful enough to ward off the entire world. Once the clock ticked over into the pocket in time and space where he no longer needed to drive anyone anywhere, the car turned into an abandoned vessel sailing across the shallow spattering seas of rain on the asphalt. He became enclosed in a bubble of some sort of spiritual silence, isolated from the rest of humanity, and this spiritual silence was not broken by a single horn-honk or rattle of roadwork or white-noise hiss of city animation and its bacteria-sprawls of restless night-goers. He was the last man alive on this desolate planet, in this tiny boxy yellow shuttle, and the flashes of light and color around him blurred into the star-speckled blanket of distant space, passed occasionally by other shuttles and ships, left only to wonder what extraterrestrial being or thing was driving behind their dark, tinted windshields. After patiently waiting through several sets of lights, his car slipped quietly out of that space-city and its space-bustle and burrowed its way into a haze of emptiness, the bridge between their world and his world. Street lamps beamed their UFO lights down, casting passing stripes of illumination over his face and the shine of his car, but failed to abduct anything. The rain had grown softer and now merely tickled down playfully without any real purpose or conviction, with the rolling, shallow waves crashing against the curb gently as he pulled up into a small gas station. It had a big, dim, yellowed Coca-Cola sign sitting at an aimlessly high elevation in the dark, like some sort of struggling, lonely beacon. Struggling to compete with the buzzing neon green piped letters reading 'GAS'. He wondered why the sign was there at all, but dismissed it as unnecessarily lofty to question why things had to be the way they were. Why was he here? The Coca-Cola sign wasn't going to question him. There was a notable thinness to the spiritual oxygen in the atmosphere of the gas station. He left his car, shut the door, and began his moon-walk under the insect-buzz of fluorescent bar-lights above him. But at the same time, the air was so thick and alive with rain and that summer night-time coolness, and warm gasoline and dust and plastic and tire-rubber, that it was dragging his senses back down to Earth with slow dedication. "Forever, and ever, you'll stay in my heart, and I will love you..." What the hell was that? "Forever, and ever..." Soft, muffled, radio-static crackling little voice, Aretha Franklin made herself known as an inhabitant of this desolate station. He stood at the side of his car with the gas pump in his hand, refilling the tank, looking over his shoulder into the refrigerator light behind the glass of the windows and door at the other end of the gas station. There, in there, there was certainly life. He returned his focus to his car. "We never will part, oh, how I love you..." His brown leather boot tapped gently to the tiny, crackling radio's powerful declarations of love. He pulled the gas pump out, with its snake-cord whacking the side of his car awkwardly, making him wince. He returned this appendage back to its body with his eyes on the register. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a moment, getting his wallet out, walking towards the door of the white concrete box. And although the door read "PULL", it wouldn't budge. He locked eyes with the first living being he'd seen in what felt like millennia- who motioned his arm to suggest one had to push instead. "Have to get that thing fixed," Spoke the man behind the register, between quiet clicks of a nail-clipper. "Right," The Muse replied, eyes scanning the unkempt shelves stocked with colorful plastic snack packaging, candy bars, cigarettes, mints, gum, batteries, and a tiny streaky-glassed fridge full of bottles. Aretha kept singing quietly, now in a harmonious duet with the buzzing fluorescent lights, or maybe with the low hum of a slowly rotating ceiling fan. Either sounded fine. The man behind the register had an expression on his cigarette-aged face that was caught in the liminal space somewhere between surly and exhausted, with a blue-grey five o' clock shadow and booze-reddened cheeks. The Muse proceeded to pay for the gas through awkward, split-second glances of eye-contact and stilted civil half-words exchanged between him and the man. "One more thing," The Muse began. "You got a bathroom?" "Not gonna shoot up, are you?" The Muse locked up for a moment, incredulous. He hesitated before speaking again. "No. I just wanna get home." "I'm kidding. It's in the basement, just go down the stairs," The man said, gesturing a hairy, lazy arm at the door in the back, to the far right of the fridge. "It's in the basement?" "It's in the basement. It's a basement bathroom." "Right."